All posts tagged: Hamas militants

What Was It All For?

What Was It All For?

Four months after the October 7 massacre by Hamas, Israel says it is continuing to pursue the total defeat of the Islamist group, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for 17 years. At the same time, Israel is reportedly negotiating a hostage deal built around a pause in the fighting that could extend for months—long enough to make the resumption of full-scale operations unlikely, and perhaps even to arrive at a negotiated settlement. The medium-term survival of Hamas politically and administratively now appears inevitable. If so, what has been the point of the Israeli military operation in Gaza? The conflict has, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, claimed the lives of 27,365 Gazans and left an estimated 8,000 missing. (Israel counts some 10,000 Hamas militants among the dead.) It has produced unspeakable human suffering, including a fast-approaching famine, and rendered much of the coastal enclave uninhabitable, while setting the Middle East aflame. If Israel was inevitably going to negotiate with Hamas for the release of the remaining hostages and then pull out its troops, only …

An Unusually Tricky Campus Free-Speech Fight

An Unusually Tricky Campus Free-Speech Fight

Late last month, the chancellor of Florida’s university system, acting in consultation with Governor Ron DeSantis, ordered state universities to deactivate all local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. How could dissolving student groups be lawful, given constitutional protections for free speech and freedom of association? Although multiple local SJP chapters acted as apologists for the murders of Israeli civilians or stood in solidarity with the Hamas militants who killed and kidnapped children, even viewpoints that deplorable are entitled to First Amendment protection. But Florida says it is not targeting the protected speech of these groups. It is acting, instead, because the national SJP has run afoul of a state law against providing “material support” to a terrorist organization. Many people associate such laws with providing money, weapons, a safe house, or fake passports to terrorists. But material-support statutes can also render speech and advocacy that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment unlawful. For example, Americans are free to post “Hurray for Hamas!” on social media. Yet an American could not coordinate …

Beware Euphemism in a Time of War

Beware Euphemism in a Time of War

An open letter signed by famous writers decrying Israel’s response to the Hamas attack shows a startling moral obtuseness. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Ahmed Zakot / SOPA Images / Getty October 18, 2023, 11:48 AM ET George Orwell is forever the patron saint of language and the ways it can become degraded in times of war—when a split occurs between what is being inflicted on human beings, on human bodies, and the words of ideologues who want to keep us from seeing “what is in front of one’s nose,” as Orwell famously put it. His iconic essay on the topic, “Politics and the English Language,” argued that euphemism and jargon and the passive voice can be deployed to hide inconvenient truths. Consider, he wrote, “the comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism.” The professor would not just come out plainly and say, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Instead, he would go for something like this: “While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain …

The Attack on Israel Was a Message From Iran

The Attack on Israel Was a Message From Iran

The Hamas attack against Israel is not only a massive Israeli intelligence and military (as well as a U.S. intelligence) failure, but also a dramatic success for Iran’s axis of resistance from Yemen to Gaza. The highly choreographed, multipronged, day-long operation and incursion into Israel itself, involving the use of motorized paragliders and drones and the taking of hostages, required months of planning and training that only Iran and Hezbollah could have provided. Late yesterday, a Hamas spokesperson told the BBC that Iranian support for the assault was a point of pride. In Tehran yesterday, members of Parliament chanted, “Death to Israel.” The Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh made a televised speech warning Arab countries that Israel could not protect them—an apparent threat against countries that had signed the Abraham Accords, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which has been considering normalizing ties with Israel. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s armed wing, said that his group’s action would at last put an end to Israeli air raids against Iranian and Hezbollah assets …